Tech Manager Handbook: A Series
Introduction
What is this and why am I doing it?
This content came about after years or building and leading data science and machine learning teams within a top tier, publicly traded, Silicon Valley tech company. As I went from leading small-medium sized teams of individual contributors (ICs) to leading large teams of managers and directors, I started to write down and share what I had learned as a way to coach and develop the leaders within my organization. After receiving positive feedback and encouragement from the team, I thought it could be interesting to release these writings to the rest of the world in the hope that they might help or benefit others that are trying to hone their management skills and style. Naturally, I’m writing from the perspective of someone who manages technical teams but I believe a lot of the ideas could apply more or less to any kind of leadership role.
Why I think I have something interesting to say
I’ve been building, scaling, and leading teams at a large Silicon Valley company for the past 10 years. During the first stretch of my management journey I went from a senior technical contributor, to an unofficial pseudo-manager, to making my first hire, to building and leading 2–3 teams of 5–7 individual contributors each (sometimes concurrently). Despite the number of direct reports (up to ~15 at one time), this didn’t evolve into a “manager of managers” role due to an untimely re-org where the two halves of my team were ultimately separated into entirely different organizations within the company.
In the second (and ongoing) stretch of my management journey, it started when I took a new position leading a small team of 3–4 data scientists. Within one year the team grew to ~15 and I hired my first manager. Within two years the team grew to ~35, began to specialize across distinct technical roles (machine learning, data science, analytics), and I was leading 4–5 managers. Within three years the team was north of 100 people, located across a handful of countries, with additional artificial intelligence and engineering specializations, and closing in on ~20 managers and directors. Despite being in the “same role” for this entire stretch of the journey, my day-to-day work and responsibilities have obviously evolved a lot over each of the past few years. I plan to draw on all of this experience and sharing what I’ve learned along the way.
Ok cool, so what kind of things will we cover?
Of course, many of the topics I write about are unsurprising (albeit still incredibly useful) such as:
- Hiring, interviewing, and selling candidates
- Delegating
- Managing low performers
- Managing your time
- Influencing others
- Building a well-rounded team
- Conducting and structuring 1:1s
- Building trust with your team
- Promoting and compensating people on your team
These topics are essentially the bread and butter of managing a team and will create a solid foundation that you can build on.
There are also many other specialized topics I write about that may come up less often but are critical to get right when they do. These are things like:
- Hiring a new manager externally vs. promoting from within
- Managing people joining your team through an acquisition
- Leading a global team that spans multiple timezones
- When and how to define different job profiles for your team
- Creating lieutenants
- Designing an organization to fit the rest of the business
- Facilitating mentorship across a large team
- Designing a career ladder for your team
- Preserving team culture while scaling incredibly fast
Final thoughts
I won’t pretend that all (of any) of the ideas presented in this series are original, even if many have been arrived at independently after my own thought and reflection. I simply hope that the ideas (discussed in a relatively straight-forward way) might be useful or insightful for others as they pursue their own management journeys.
If you think this is for you, subscribe and stay tuned for the actual content to follow!
